On
Wednesday, December 18 (2019), I joined Herb Reichert of Stereophileand
Steve Guttenberg of Audiophiliac Daily, at John Rutan's
retail store Audio Connections in Verona, New Jersey to listen to Magnepan's prototype/concept
speaker, currently dubbed '30.7 for Condos' (hereafter, FC). Audio Connections
was the latest stop in Magnepan's road show orchestrated by Wendell Diller and
his spouse, Galina. Whereas pre-production listening sessions are ubiquitous,
pre-production road shows are not! This begs the question: Why an elaborate road
show in the case of 'for Condos'?

I asked Wendell, who I had not previously met, exactly that.
He emphasized his desire to 'democratize' the process by which decisions about
which products to put into production are made. I am not sure that 'democratizing' the process is quite the right way to characterize the road
show. In the first place, while it may be unavoidable, if not always, desirable
to maximize the number of eligible voters actually voting (on the theory that
doing so provides political legitimacy), there is no analogous reason for a
private company to extend 'voting' privileges regarding their product
development decisions.

Wendell Diller of Magnepan

It may be more helpful to understand the value of the road
show in the following way: (1) while relying on a trusted group of educated ears
(as a de facto 'focus group') has served manufacturers well, doing so is not
without drawbacks. The 'trusted' group of old hands is trusted in part because
of their familiarity with the house sound, which makes them vulnerable to
confirmation bias and less likely to welcome significant departures from it. Nor
are they likely to be representative of the full range of potential end users.
If anything, reliance on a small set of influencers may have the foreseeable if
unintended consequence of restricting the set of potential end users to those
most likely to be impacted by the endorsement or criticism of a particular group
of influencers.

Feedback NeededWhat Magnepan seeks is feedback, not votes. With that in mind,
(2) in the 40+ years during which I have been stricken by the financially
debilitating illness, 'audiophilia,' I have found the general quality of
reviewers' ears to be no better (on average) than those of serious, critical
listeners who don't put pen to paper, but for whom, listening to music, live and
recorded, is integral not only to their self-understanding but to their personal
fulfillment as well. Relatedly, (3) exposing potential products to a wider range
of listeners is likely to secure feedback from a more diverse group of
individuals across a range of attributes that would or should be relevant to
manufacturers, including age, gender, race, musical preferences and more.

Reasons (1) to (3) would apply to any and all products Magnepan
contemplates putting into production.[1]
The question is not why this hasn't been done before; the answer to that
question is simply that while desirable, it is too costly and time consuming and
the advantages of doing so are not worth the costs. The question is why now, and
the answer must be that there is something special and different about the FC
speaker that justifies the investment. There is: (4) the FC represents a radical
departure in speaker design for Magnepan.

In a nutshell, after insisting for 50
years that only a planar design can accurately and otherwise satisfactorily
reproduce real bass and mid-bass, Magnepan is contemplating introducing a
speaker that mates their familiar midrange panel and ribbon tweeter approach
with dynamic drivers to cover the lower frequencies.To be sure, the dynamic
drivers are configured as dipoles fixed to an open baffle, but concessions to
the dipole presentation and the absence of a closed box aside, this design is
nothing short of heretical — especially for a company that has preached and
practiced a particular approach for as long as Magnepan has.

(2) Does it integrate sonically and seamlessly with the planar elements?

Herb Reichert, Dr. Jules Coleman, and Steven Guttenberg

These are appropriate questions, but neither Herb, Steve, nor I
found ourselves focusing on answering them. And that is because the FC concept
speaker is in many ways altogether different than any Magnepan speaker we have
ever heard — and better, much better.

Why A Road Show?While it makes sense to open up the road show to fresh ears,
there is an obvious virtue in having old hands listen as well. Steve, Herb and I
have separately listened to and owned a lot of previous and current generation
Maggies. I may have the oldest relationship among us with Maggies, having owned
a pair of the original Tympanis, later the 1s, the 3.6s and currently the 1.7is.
Steve has owned an equal number and currently listens regularly to the LSR. Herb
is currently listening to the .7s. I think it is fair to say that we know the
house sound, appreciate and enjoy it. On the other hand, each of us has a lot of
experience with very different sonic signatures. For nearly a decade I had a
full Shindo, horn based reference system that I loved and would have lived
happily with till I could no longer hear, but life intervened. As many of you
know Herb was an early distributor of the original Audio Note gear and the first
to import Avantgarde into the US. Steve owns and is a great fan of TAD
loudspeakers. We know the Magnepan sound, but not only the Magnepan sound.

I think we probably all agree about its limitations or
drawbacks as well. While every Magnepan speaker I have ever heard is musically
natural and convincing and the paradigm (at each price point) of a high-end
audio value, to varying degrees, all Magnepan speakers are challenged in bass
extension, dynamics and transient response which is expressed by notes being
presented with rounded leading edges. Size aside, they are without question
among the easiest loudspeakers with which to live.

They also have the advantage
that if you feed them enough power, they will basically do what they do.[2]
They are not fussy. For a reviewer, this is sometimes a disadvantage because
Magnepans are not as revealing of upstream differences as are other speakers,
for example, horns. Speaking only for myself, I attribute this in part to the
rounded leading edges and to a harmonic fullness that is not matched by
equivalent harmonic inner detail. I find as well that as the panels get larger,
the sound takes on a Phil Spector wall of sound quality. For me, the 3 range
represent the sweetspot in terms of size and natural musicality, image
specificity, density and clarity. The bigger speakers are better in some ways,
but not in every way. It depends on what features of playback are musically most
significant for a particular listener.

Our time with the FC speakers was relatively limited and I don't
want to draw a conclusion that I may have to walk back once the speakers are put
into production (if they are), and the inevitable compromises required by mass
production put in place. With that caveat in hand, I would say that the FC
speaker sounds like no other Magnepan and in ways that may well render it far
and away the best Magnepan speaker I have ever heard, and not by a little bit
either.

Different In What Ways?(1) These speakers had a transient response that was
immediately noteworthy, and not in the sense of bringing undo attention to the
leading edge. (2) They displayed a dynamic realism that I had previously
associated only with the very best horn loudspeakers. (3) The focus and inner
detail is captivating and so is (4) the speaker's expression of dynamic shadings
throughout the frequency range. (5) Imaging is expansive and void of all forms
of artifact. (6) Instruments and voices had a uniform density and weight that is
almost always absent in the top end of most playback systems I have experienced.

Steve played several Chesky recordings at which he was
present, one of which – Jazz in the New Harmonic – he and I have heard many
times live. During the listening session Steve turned to me and said that on the
FC system the (7) experience sounded more like a live performance than a
recorded one. (8) Quality listening was possible off axis; there was certainly
no restrictive sweet spot. Finally, (9) the speakers energized a reasonably
large room in ways that one associates only with large box speakers and almost
never with either planars or electrostatics.

Returning to the two questions Wendell apparently wanted
feedback on: Does the dipole dynamic open baffle array provide planar quality
mid-bass? The answer is No. It provides much more convincing mid-bass dynamics
than I have heard on any Magnepan speaker — even the Tympani. Does the dipole
dynamic open baffle array integrate with the Magnepan planar units well?
Absolutely.[3]

The Larger PictureIf you focus on these questions you will likely miss the
larger picture. Magnepan accepts the view that when it comes to speaker design,
the ideal speaker would be massless. Each iteration of the basic design is an
attempt to get closer to that goal. I leave it to others to judge whether they
have succeeded at every turn. I do have the sense, however, that until now every
step they have taken has produced a speaker system with very much the same basic
characteristics. This most recent step — if it too represents another step
along the path of reducing mass to the theoretical limit — has changed
everything for them.

My impression, admittedly on first listen, is that the FC
is discontinuous with previous iterations. The FC maintains the Magnepan
musicality and naturalness, but in a presentation that is not merely a marginal
increment, but a flipping of the script. I have no idea what the final product
will look like or what it will sound like. After all, the folks at Magnepan may
decide that what Steve, Herb and I found revelatory in the design is not what
they are looking for. What I can say with some confidence, however, is that if
Magnepan doesn't manufacture the speaker as we heard it in New Jersey, someone
should; and if there remains a modicum of fairness left in the world, they will
be rewarded accordingly.

Footnotes:[1] Indeed, it would apply to all manufacturers.

[2] The FC speakers were driven by a modestly priced and
powered amplifier called the Maggie 300 which was designed and produced by a
company in Minneapolis. Magnepan does not have a formal partnership with them,
so it would be a mistake to think of the relationship as analogous to the one
between Magnepan and Audio Research. We listened entirely to digital (CD), but I
gave no notice to the CD player. To get a list of the CDs we listened to visit
Steve Guttenberg's channel on You Tube where he breaks down his experience of
the same event and provides some additional color.